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Section 2
AMERICAN LIVES
W. E. B. Du Bois
Scholar, Activist, Critic
“The world was thinking wrong about race because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.”—W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940)
W
. E. B. Du Bois’s ideas evolved over his long
career. In one thing, however, he was constant. He wanted to highlight the contributions and
condition of African Americans because, he once
said, “The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color line.”
Du Bois (1868–1963), born in Massachusetts,
received a shock when he reached Fisk University,
an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee. There
he experienced for the first time segregation in the
South. He later wrote that only an African
American “going into the South for the first time
can have any conception of [segregation’s] barbarism.“ After graduation from Fisk, he attended
Harvard University, where he learned to question
accepted ideas.
Du Bois began to teach while he continued
work for his Ph.D., which he was awarded in 1895.
In his doctoral dissertation, he argued that the slave
trade was ended not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. A brilliant study, it made his name as a
scholar. Du Bois’s next book, The Philadelphia
Negro, was an equally impressive work of sociology.
In it, Du Bois argued forcefully against the idea—
quite common at the time—that racial differences
were based on genetic traits.
By the turn of the century, Du Bois began a period of political activism. Joining with 28 other
African-American intellectuals, he founded the
Niagara Movement. This group rejected the views of
Booker T. Washington, a leading African American.
Washington urged blacks to pursue job training and
use economic advances to secure political rights. The
Niagara Movement disagreed, flatly stating, “We
want full manhood suffrage and we want it now.” Du
Bois criticized Washington even though Atlanta
University, where he worked, depended on financial
aid from Washington supporters.
This movement was taken into the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, formed in 1909. Du Bois left Atlanta
University to become editor of the NAACP’s jour-
80 Unit 2, Chapter 8
nal, Crisis. He held the position for 25 years and
used it to protest lynching and the denial of rights
to African Americans, to celebrate the achievements of African culture, and to promote AfricanAmerican art. From time to time, he took positions
opposed by the NAACP.
One cause of these differences was Du Bois’s
broadening views and growing socialism. World
War I convinced him that the root of African
Americans’ problems was white imperialism.
Slavery and segregation, in this view, were just one
aspect of this imperialism, which was also suppressing people of color around the world. Du Bois also
began to believe that economic condition determined political status. He urged African Americans
to adopt economic segregation from mainstream
American life. The NAACP, though, supported
integration. Eventually, these differences led him to
resign from editing Crisis.
Du Bois still had almost three decades of work
remaining. In his later writings, he continued to
broaden his concern to include the oppressed
around the world, especially people of color. He
defined Karl Marx’s term—the proletariat—as more
than just white laborers in Europe and America.
This class was “overwhelmingly of the darker workers of Asia, Africa, the islands of the sea, and South
Central America . . . who are supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury, and extravagance.” His
radical views led to his arrest in the anticommunist
hysteria of the 1950s. But Du Bois refused to stop
speaking out. In his last major work, a three-novel
series called The Black Flame, he used fiction to analyze the African-American experience from the end
of Reconstruction to the postwar period.
Questions
1. Why was Du Bois startled when he went to Fisk
University?
2. What incidents show Du Bois’s independence of
mind?
3. How did Du Bois’s ideas change over time?
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